Does it say anything at all, is the first question.
I’m sure we’ve seen many 80s and 90s Hollywood films and sitcoms where someone checks their voicemail in the landline phone at home as soon as they open the door.
One of my personal favorites is a Seinfeld episode where George gets Jerry’s help to switch a voicemail tape!
I posed an innocuous question this morning on Twitter – on why Indians seem shit scared to leave a voice message. And, how India completely passed an entire communication trend and jumped straight into mobile-based equivalents like missed call and text messages.
Some feedback about voicemails included Indians possibly not being comfortable with speaking to a machine…or the cost of a phone instrument that includes an answering machine. Both are valid, but the actual issue was the rate of adoption, as rightly pointed by some tweeters. India caught on to landlines rather slowly and by the it went really big, mobile phones landed in the spectrum and completely negated any reason to adopt voicemails as a messaging plank.
US perhaps had a long enough period between widespread landline adoption and mobile phone introduction.
But, that ‘not comfortable speaking to a machine’ throws up an interesting thought. If you notice social media adoption…by brands and by people, speaking to brands via social media, is it a cultural thing in reality?
Yes, the rate of adoption is dependent on internet penetration and cost of hardware that enables that penetration, but, from a cultural perspective, do countries that assume that they are ‘not so comfortable speaking to a machine’ (just to add the voicemail analogy) take more time to get accustomed to interact with brands via social media?
For example, for years, we Indians had one means of communication with brands – the written letter. Or, snail mail. Phones came in much later. Email, even later. Now, there are social platforms to interact with brands, but what do Indians do with this newly acquired power?
Barring early adopters, who seem to have got the nuances of social media interaction, majority of them are still grappling with what to do with all this. Is that a factor of not knowing what exactly to do with such platforms? Or is it more about the impersonal nature of such communication?
For every Comcastcares on Twitter that uses the ‘I’ tone and have a human name and face to respond to queries, we have tons of Indian brands with just a brand name – no human name, no human face. Funnily enough, they use the ‘I’ tone too, assuming that the person managing the profile IS the brand.
Digression: Shouldn’t they ideally use the ‘we’ tone?
Not just Twitter – take facebook for instance. How many Indian brands do you see on facebook that have a human name listed for actual interactions. Would things change if they do so? Or, will Indians get used to the ‘addressing the brand’ (equivalent to ‘addressing the machine’ syndrome) and simply evolve?
What do you think?